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welterweight in a clinch; passages, one might think, which could only end in ecstasy or a dead faint. Soaring glissandos, cascading pengös: all eyes grew mistier as cork after cork was drawn... Who paid for all this? Certainly not me—even a gesture towards helping was jovially brushed aside as though it were not worth the waste of words. (The day after I arrived I had made for the Consulate in the Zoltán utca and picked up a registered envelope with an unprecedented six pounds which had mounted up since Vienna.)
    Very many of these people talked English; when an exception cropped up, German was used, sometimes, I think for historical reasons, rather reluctantly; but it was the universal second language. The automatic use of Du , even to strangers if they were friends of friends, was very surprising. Sie , it seemed, meant relegation to the outer darkness and people had been known to fight with swords about the matter. (The fact that duels were still frequent in Hungary—not mere student encounters, but fierce set-to’s with sabres—gave a Prisoner of Zenda touch to a fantastic and, no doubt, wildly inaccurate picture which was fast taking shape in my mind.) Their easy ways, like the Austrians’, had a stiffening of old-fashioned punctilio. (I liked the kissing of women’s hands, but the formal kissing of the hands of men by household staff or by peasants seemed strange. It was the custom all over Eastern Europe and after a while it seemed not servile so much as antiquated, a hoary ritual surviving, like fealty, from feudal times, which, of course, is exactly what it was.) These particular Hungarians cared a lot about dress. Tigers for turnout, they were well-groomed in what used to be thought the English style; but they didn’t give a damn about my rough-and-ready outfit. The best I could manage was a tweed coat and some grey canvas trousers, which, with a clean shirt and a blue tie, looked almost presentable; but the footgear let me down—this was always gym or tennis shoes, whichever looked cleaner. But it didn’t matter.
    After a lifetime of educational croppers and bad school reports, my luck seemed suddenly to have changed. Ever since my halt inMunich, letters with exhortations to kindness from my Baltic-Russian friends there, [2] and then from the friends they had written to, had been flying eastwards, and they unloosed cornucopias of warm and boundless hospitality when I caught up with them. I was full of gratitude to my benefactors and I loved them, but I don’t think I ever actually wondered why I struck so lucky. If their friends had asked them to help, I suppose they couldn’t quite wash their hands of me; but the main reason for their hospitality was a general kind feeling towards the young and the broke. The accident of nationality may also have been a help, particularly then: I think Hungarians had a definite soft spot for England. Absorption and enjoyment are catching and my attitude to life resembled a sea-lion’s to the flung bloater. They were amused by accounts of the journey: some said they wished they had done the same; and they were impressed that I only took lifts in really bad weather. Nobody else was travelling like this in those days, so the expedition had the value of rarity: it is almost past belief, but only once during the whole journey did I meet another soul who had set out in the same way.
    A couple of months earlier, on the road between Ulm and Augsburg, I had dived out of a snowstorm into a lonely Gasthaus and the only other customer taking refuge there was a strange-looking boy of about my age, dressed in a black corduroy jacket and a scarlet waistcoat with brass buttons, who was banging the snow off an already very battered top-hat with his forearm; back askew on his head, it gave him a look of Sam Weller. He told me, as we threw schnapps down our throats, that he was wearing the traditional costume of a Hamburg chimney-sweep’s